Tuesday, November 28, 2006

At Giganews, we love to try all sorts of gadgets and applications to make our day a little easier. Which is why when we learned about an application that allows you to access Usenet away from your desktop/laptop using any computer and a USB thumb-drive, we were itching to try it.

How does it work?

For starters, you need to download a program called MojoPac and have access to a USB thumb-drive (my drive was a twenty dollar 1GB Memorex USB thumb-drive). Note: MojoPac will ONLY run off of flash-based removable storage devices. Also, MojoPac only works on 32-bit Windows XP based OS's, sorry Mac.

After downloading MojoPac you need to run the install and point it to your thumb-drive. MojoPac will create a profile setting for you similar to creating a new user profile in Windows XP. All of your personal settings, shortcuts and … installed programs are accessed via your MojoPac "virtual desktop" stored on the thumb-drive. Awesome!Usenet Testing To test Usenet access, I installed NewsBin Pro and Newsleecher from my MojoPac desktop portal on my thumb-drive, and after configuring the servers, subscribing to my favorite newsgroups and some last minute tweaking, I was browsing Usenet Newsgroups without any noticeable drop in speed or performance. Pretty cool! Better yet, all of my subscribed groups, server settings, etc, are retained every time I start my news client within MojoPac. Security isn't a problem using Giganews' SSL feature and the stealthy ability of MojoPac to secure your files apart from the host computer. After unplugging my drive, no trace of my activity was left on the host computer. That's because everything resides within my MojoPac profile stored on my thumb-drive. Simple and Powerful!